Man should discover his own reality and not thwart himself. For he has his self as his only friend, or as his only enemy. A person has the self as friend when he has conquered himself, But if he rejects his own reality, the self will war against him. Hinduism.

Bhagavad-Gita 6.5-6

There is a children’s tale about a woman who felt that her house was too small, so she went to a wise man to advise her, and he told her to bring in one animal to live in her house. Each time she felt the house growing smaller, she was advised to bring one more animal into the house, when the house was so crowded that she could no longer move, she was told to take them all out of the house. When she did this, her house seemed large and roomy, and she was grateful for the space that she had.

The house did not change. Her perception of the house changed and the same house that she once hated became a house for which she felt gratitude. That gratitude opened her to feeling joy. Imagine for a moment, that it rains for two weeks straight how beautiful and joyous you feel on the day you look out and see the blue sky and a brightly shining sun. We spend our lives wanting what other people have, the job that provides for the house on the hill, the job that pays for the Porsche or the Mercedes, instead of the job that affords you the junkyard reject on wheels that you are driving. Imagine that you walk in today and you get your pink slip. Now you can’t even pay for the junkyard wreck let alone your rent, food, children’s clothes etc. Go one step further and imagine that the phone rings and they offer you the same job back. Now you don’t care about the house on the hill, you don’t care about the Porsche or the Mercedes, instead you thank God for that phone call, and that dirty office, or that lousy cash register which shines like a brand new penny!!
For a time, generally in proportion to the time that you spent without the job, you are grateful for every difficult day that you go to work and you don’t even give a second thought to what it doesn’t give you because you are so grateful to have what it does. I had some jewelry that had meant so much to me when I received it, but, as time went on, it became stale and valueless to me. Then one day the jewelry was gone, I panicked, and when, after two days of searching, I found it, it was like the first day I had ever laid eyes on it. I felt such overwhelming joy and gratitude that it was actually mine. All of these things, the sun, the sky, the job, the car, those things that shone for one moment in your life and now were dull, overlooked and underappreciated, like the basic fact that you woke up and saw one more day, are always the same as they are in empty situations, like cups to be filled by you with whatever you choose—gratitude and joy or resentment and sorrow. This is life, a chain of consecutive experiences void of emotion until we fill them with whichever emotions we choose.

‘Man struggles to find life outside himself, unaware that the life he is seeking is within him.’
Kahlil Gibran

Whether we believe that the things occurring in our lives are pre-determined or the result of our free will really doesn’t matter in the end. The indisputable choice that we have is what emotions we fill our experiences with. This is where our free will is at it’s purest. Things don’t fill us with joy or sadness—we fill them. Life doesn’t emote—we do. We enliven our world, we color it, first as individuals, then as generations, as societies, as a species, and finally as souls. Even so, the world in which we are born has been colored, to some extent, by those who have preceded us, our personal world, our subjective world—the world that is there for our particular journey is, for all intents and purposes, colorless and formless until we give it color and form; until we label each person and each experience good, bad, painful or joyful.

‘We choose our joys and our sorrows long before we experience them.’ Kahlil Gibran

My daughter, Lia, told me that she could deal with anything so long as she could label it. This is because “out there” is meaningless until we bring it inside, label, and classify it. We must give it meaning and color within our own description of the world. When we are young, we learn language—we learn the descriptions of the impressions that we receive from the outside world. We are told that a certain object is a table, that a table is a flat surface supported by four legs. In our brain which is our personal computer, we are not able to make infer that all flat surfaces with four legs are tables. Our brains take the labels that we are given for the object as a whole, then they dissect the object into its parts. By doing this, our brains can automatically make connections to things that are the same as or different than.

Labeling and classifying becomes more difficult when we deal with intangibles, such as experiences. When we are very young we dissect, label, and classify experiences in the same way as we do everything else—we record what we are told and what we see, i.e., the reactions of our parents, who are our first teachers, to the appropriate stimuli. When we are faced with situations that our brains tell us match one of the experiences to which we have a recorded parental response, we mimic that response. Whenever we feel a contradictory response coming from within ourselves, we push it away as inappropriate relying on the blueprint of the world that we received as children.

As children, we live in the world of our families. We spend the major portion of our time with them and so, we live in their world. Our survival instincts tell us that we must know and understand the world in which we live. More than a thing or an experience, life is a language. As children we learn the words, the idioms, the nuances of the languages of those around me. That language tells us where to go and what to do so we may find our way around and live as best we can within their world. As we approach our teens, we find ourselves spending the better part of our time in a new world, the world of our peers. And because of the large amount of time that we spend, because of the dictates of life at this point, within our peer group, we must create a new language, one which is distinct enough to distinguish one world from the other. This is generally opposite to the language that we grew up with. This new language is contrary to the language of our family environment not because it is a period of rebellion, but because of evolutionary design. We refuse to acknowledge our initial language, the one given to us by our parents, simply because we are unable to maintain two contradictory beliefs. The language of our parents is a combination of the language of the greater whole, the society within which we live, the language of their generation, and their own personal language.

When we move into our peer group, we learn the language of our own generations, and the idioms of our own peer society. It is only after we have an understanding of all of these languages that we are able to confidently begin to develop, and respond to a reality based upon own personally formed languages. During these teen years we slowly develop a language that comes from our personal responses as they are weighed against the database that we now have of prior learned responses from our families, our peer groups, our teachers and advisors, and the greater society around us. As we develop own languages, we gravitate towards others whose languages are the same as, or similar to ours. We develop a religious language, a philosophical language, a moral language—a language that as clearly as possible distinguishes good from bad, dangerous from safe, and happy from sad. It is vital to understand that it is in our personal language, and not in the object or experience being defined by that language, that our feelings and emotional responses are defined.

When I was young, in my personal language, marriage meant happily ever after. My definition of marriage included love, security, and escape from sadness. From watching my struggle as a single mother to support my daughter Tana and myself, Tana was led to define the word children, in her language, as sacrifice and burden. I only told her how much I loved her, but still, from observing my struggle, she developed her own personal language to describe, and thus create, her reality of motherhood.

The world out there is not alive until we animate it with our personal definitions, our personal language. Nothing out there can make us feel one way or another. The feelings that we get from anyone, anything, or any experience don’t lie within the person, thing, or experience but they lie within ourselves, within our languages and the descriptions that our languages give to them. Often, we will say, or hear someone else say, “I just don’t know how to react to that”. This is because it is a situation to which the person has not yet defined and thus, has not yet attributed an emotion. Or, someone will exclaim, “Oh, that’s what that was!” and immediately they will replay the scene in their minds so that they can label, define and feel the appropriate reaction. Life is a coloring book with only the lines drawn in and we can choose whatever colors we want to fill in the pages. Or, life can be viewed as a book filled with Rorschach images, and it is up to us to write the story for each page.

It is possible for life to be fated, and at the same time, it can be true that we create our own reality. These terms are not contradictory. In life, fate means that we don’t chose the stage, the scenery or the props with which we have to work. We have to utilize what is there. We don’t choose our entrances or our exits. But within those limits, we live, and how we live our lives is determined by the language we use to define reality. There is no such thing as objective reality. And our subjective reality can either be determined by consensus or by personal design. To create our own reality we need to siphon off reach inside, find our own language, our own meaning, and use it. What has been a life well lived, or life wasted lies in the definition and not the life. We must stop seeking the definitions of others when it comes to living our own lives. God has planted within our souls the keys to the kingdom. Those keys are the symbols of the language of our individual souls. Out there may or may not be real. It may or may not be predetermined. Reality, however, is personal, and our definition of it determines the quality of our lives. We can choose to accept the consensus defined reality, or define it for ourselves. If we define it for ourselves, we will never outgrow it, because it will grow with us. We will suffer if we expect to do what others define as the right thing at all times. If our reality is defined by others, simply keeping up with their language of right and wrong will be stressful enough in itself. There is a difference between being right and being true. More times than not, right is defined by consensus, but true, is the cornerstone of integrity and it is defined by self alone. We can be certain to be true at all times, if we live by a reality that is defined by our truth.

My grandmother’s language was designed around two words, usefulness and independence. Indulgence and dependence were at the core of my mother’s language. Within the same week, both my mother and my grandmother became wheelchair bound. My grandmother was destroyed by it. In her language, my grandmother’s wheelchair caused her to be dependent and useless. Her disability placed her into an environment where her language rendered her unable to communicate with herself. Because the foundation of her language defined everything in terms of black or white, she couldn’t label and therefore couldn’t understand this new situation. Before she could begin to function, to heal, she had to learn an entirely new language—an entirely new language for describing – coloring – her life. Once she did this, once she allowed for the expansion of her own language to allow for her physical limitation, rather than exclude it, she found that she could be almost as useful and independent as she had once been. For my mother, the loss of her ability to walk fit perfectly into the language of her reality. It required no adjustments or redefinitions.

Life, out there, is neither good nor bad. It is incapable of doing anything to us. It doesn’t have the power to make us feel happy or sad, valuable, useless, lovable, unlovable, beautiful, ugly, smart, stupid, fat, or thin. We can expect nothing of life and life expects nothing of us. Our lives are determined by the quality of our living. That quality is derived from our personal language, the labels, the meanings with which we color the props and the backdrops of our living. Out there has no effect on us, it’s in here.

There is no mountain that we cannot climb so long as we can fix our eyes on the peak
To truly believe something is to have innate knowledge. That innate knowledge is faith. Faith is connected with inner sight, the sight that sees the truth that our eyes do not see. We are only capable of believing that which is possible. We all believe in fate. Even those people, who feel that they are totally in charge of their lives, believe that at some point that something happened in their lives that had the feeling of Divine Intervention. There was at least some moment in which fate played a part.

Whether we believe that fate is the path defined by God, by the Universe or simply the path we ourselves determined prior to coming here; fate still has a hand in determining the path that we walk.
We each contain knowledge of our path. The Maya, or the veil of illusion, fools us into believing that we are driven by our wants, our desires, or our wishes, when in fact what moves us ahead are our possibilities. Each of us longs to fulfill our own destiny. It is through our needs, our wishes, desires and our choices that we are guided towards that destiny. When we are able to visualize something or when we are fueled with the passion for something to the point that such a passion consumes us, this is not a desire. It is in fact a, “Knowing”. It is a piercing of the veil of illusion to that which actually will be.

We cannot sustain a burning desire for anything that we cannot actually achieve. If in fact we are capable of truly visualizing a goal, it is not simply a goal; it is the actual vision of our destiny. The fact that it is real and not just imaginary is the only reason that we are actually capable of visualizing it.
It is our beliefs that work to manifest our reality. We cannot truly hold on to a belief that is impossible to realize. We may hold a vision for a short period of time but we cannot maintain it unless it is real. Therefore if we can really believe something to be true, if we can really believe that we can attain a certain goal, this is only because we will attain it, or at least it is within our capabilities to attain it.

Let’s say that we all come into this incarnation with what I call a, “Bag of ‘Haves”’. These are the things that are within us to do, to accomplish, or to obtain. These things are a part of our destiny. The knowledge of these things is expressed through our dreams, wishes and desires. We would take no notice of or at least we would not be able to retain any desire for these same objects, positions, or relationships if they were not within our ability to have.

Many times we are obsessed with getting to one point and once there we feel as though it isn’t where we want to be at all. This wasn’t a mistake; it was a step that we had to reach on the road to our ultimate destiny. The lessons come in each step of the process and sometimes the lessons are meant to make us feel lost, or out of step because within that experience is the key to the next door, or the clue to our next step.

Some people spend their entire lives feeling lost and out of place. Even that would mean that within those feelings are the lessons to be learned in this lifetime. What is important to remember is that we are always going to have what we came here to have. We always have what we really need; it may be just a matter of time and experience until we receive it.

There was a time when in order to get a donkey to move they would attach a carrot to a stick and put that stick on the donkey’s head. The donkey would keep going in order to reach the carrot. Of course he never reached it because it was always in front of him. Yet, he always had it because it was attached to his head. He would go around chasing the carrot because he could see it, but actually the reason that he could visualize the carrot is because he really had it. He could not reach the carrot because he did not believe that he had it. If he believed he had it, he would find a way to get it off of his head, instead of chasing it. Faith is the step to remove the carrot from the head and place it in the hand. The carrot is ours and it is on our heads. We simply have to take it.

We just see the carrot as what we want as what we wish for and desire. When we have faith, we realize that the carrot is ours and we stop following it and just take it. But if it were not attached to our heads, if it were not in front of our eyes, in other words within our, “bag of haves”, we could not think to desire or want it.
So it is helpful to say that if we can visualize what we want and believe it, then it is truly already ours, it is in fact attached to our heads; now it is just a matter of getting to it. When we are capable of visualizing a thing, a goal, or a relationship so totally that we can feel it and believe it, that is not the work of our imagination, it is simply piercing the veil into the truth of what is really ours. When we are taught that the appropriate prayer for receiving what we want is a prayer of thanks for having it already, it is truly appropriate. The reason being that we do actually have it already. “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours…” (Mark 11:24)

Understanding this does not change the fact that it is in front of us and not in our hands. We must still do the work of reaching for it whatever that may entail. The difference is that if we know that it is actually ours and there is a way that it can be reached, we can remove our confusion, and our doubt. We may simply focus on getting it. This still requires faith. If I know that the thing that I desire is behind one of the doors before me, I will get it.

We are here to learn lessons, to grow, to perfect our souls. This is done through our experiences here on earth. We all have our own destiny, our own path along which lies our personal lessons and our, “haves”. In order to reach each of our “haves” we must pass through different experiences, and in order to hold onto our, “haves” we must again go through lesson.

An infant has a burning desire, an obsession to raise its head. It is not really a goal from our point of view; it is a step toward standing and walking. It is simply a step in the path of development for a human being. However to that infant it is the end product. That infant cannot focus on anything else until it reaches that goal. Then it moves to the goal of turning over. Well, we do not spend our entire lives rolling over, even though while striving for that goal, to the infant, it is complete in itself.

We can only see the horizon and consider reaching it as our goal. However, each horizon turns into another. Each horizon takes us closer to God. When we finally reach the horizon, we are there. This is also how it works with our “haves”.
The stronger the desire is that one has, the more one is connected to that, “innate knowing”. There really is no such thing as a desire. A desire is really the veil that covers one’s destiny. We cannot desire what is not ours, just as the donkey could not desire the carrot if it were not visible in front of it’s face twenty four hours a day.

I am not referring to the desire that comes from envy, or from wanting what someone else has. That is not a desire for the thing in itself it is a desire for the feeling that the other person exhibits from having whatever it is. If I know that what I want is definitely in front of me; that it is definitely behind one of the doors that I am facing, even though I must still find which door and face what ever challenges lie before me, I know that it is mine. The difference is that I will reach it because I know that it will be there whenever and however I get there. Most of all I know that I will get there.

When we are clear and able to focus on the journey and the process and are not confused by doubt or fear then we are able to listen and accept the guidance that is constantly given to us on our path to attainment. We can learn our lessons as we travel because we are awake to our journey and not lost in fear.

It is important to understand that the lesson, is the process and the process contains the journey, the journeyer and the destination.

Clogged with yesterday’s excess, the body drags the mind down with it.—

Horace, BC 65-8, Italian Poet

I have been drawn to the saying, “Today is the beginning of the rest of my life”, but that still implies an attachment to the last part of my life, which does not allow me to let it go. What today is—is the beginning of my life. At the moment we are born, we enter into a situation that is ongoing. We enter a family, an environment, which is an accumulation of the beliefs and experiences of our parents. Whatever our parents believe, whatever they have to work with, whatever mistakes they feel they have or have not made is the setting for our entrance into this world. That is the form or the foundation on which we build picture of the world and our place in it. We are not responsible for anything that has occurred prior to our birth. It is not a reflection of who we are, or even necessarily who we once were, it contains the tools that we will take with us and the base that we will forever move from.

We are to take what we need from that environment, and to learn that it belongs to and was created by our parents. We incarnate to move forward, and to do this, we must face forward. In whatever way our parent’s beliefs or actions affected us, we only carry with us the necessary tools for our journey forward. It is our launching pad into life. Why it is that way is not initially important. This is where we begin our journey as souls in this human experience, but it is where our parent’s journey has brought them to that point. How our ego has formed during our past lives to this point, and what gains our souls hope to make through this experience determine our reaction to this environment. Throughout our lives we will constantly hold this time as the baseline from which we judge everything else, including ourselves. It is the country into which we are born. It establishes the world view through which we develop the means to satisfy our needs, in order to survive. It a world view, but for the rest of our lives, we will journey to the understanding that it is not our world view, and not the best or the only true world view. It is in the first home that we learn to maneuver, learn what and where the things are that we need and need to avoid, it prepares of for our entrance into the greater world. Based upon the needs of our souls and the condition of our egos, we decide whether or not we will react to life in the way that our parents did. They are teachers for us. Whatever experiences we had as children were a part of our learning and not a part of our being.

We will encounter many things in our first home. Most of our experiences here are designed to help awaken the wounds that we entered this life to heal, and to develop the resources necessary to function creatively in this incarnation. Age does not automatically imply wisdom, it implies experience. One soul can gain as much wisdom in the first seven years of life that another takes eighty years to gain. Our bodies are born from the genetic material of our parents, our souls are not. Wisdom is within the soul, not the body. We are not here to be carbon copies of our parents; we are here to examine who they are and take what is relevant and leave behind what is not. Our parent’s reality is an important experience. It is the foundation for our major in this life. But like a school, or a certain curriculum it was there before we decided to major in a subject for which it was a prerequisite. It was not designed for us or by us. It was a home designed and built out of the materials of our parent’s experiences and beliefs. It was created before our arrival into the material world and has no place in our identity.

Our childhood experiences are for information only, not to weigh us down. It may be an extension of their identity but it is not ours. When we are babies, the things in the house around us give us an immediate impression of the world. That impression is that it is far greater than we are and that we are powerless before it. All of the things that service the grown-ups just tower over us. We have high chairs, kiddy tables, playpens, walker, carriages, toys, etc. As we age, we grow. Along the way our view of the world around us changes, we get larger and our kiddy furniture gets smaller, our toys lose their appeal. While at the same time we begin to reach the big people’s table and chairs. Our view of the physical world around us changes as we grow equal to, and then greater than the things in the world.

As we journey away from that original home, we must be willing to see what no longer fits us and let it go. We must be willing to see what will never fit us, and let go of trying to force ourselves to fit into it. Being unwilling to let go here, is like being unwilling to let go of sitting in the highchair, or sleeping in the crib. It becomes uncomfortable and even painful to continue to reference the past while in the present. We learned how to move around that home, how to maneuver the squeaky floors, get around the furniture, find the food, etc. But when we go out into the world believing that it is the same as the one that we left, we find that everything is in a different place, and when we try to deal with it in the same way as we dealt with our childhood home, it doesn’t work. So, when we decide that we will not approach life the way that our parents did, it makes no difference if we still believe that life is as they taught us. Our lives will not work. And if we decide to approach life exactly as our parents did, that too does not work because the life that they designed, only exists in their space. We find that we are facing a strange new world and their approach today may not get the same results. When we live in our parents worldview, we live in a house where everything is as they placed it. When we leave and go out to build our own lives, we enter a house where nothing is where our parents put it, and nothing works like it did in their design. The world for us is new. We must design it ourselves. Only by letting go of what worked then and there, can we ever hope to find what works here and now. And most importantly, what works for us.

A child born into poverty will emotionally identify with that condition, will see himself as poor, and his life and choices as limited to those of his parents. If his parents saw drugs or crime as the only outlets, these will be imprinted on the child as well. A child born to parents of privilege will expect the world to offer the same service to them as they experienced while in their parent’s reality. When this child takes this worldview out into his own world, he could be crushed by the refusal of the world to comply with his expectations. Each child, for reasons of the soul growth, will be born into that chapter of their parent’s lives as the point from which to grow.
How our parents reached the point in their lives in which we incarnated is their history. We study history to better create our future. We cannot identify with our parent’s history because it is not ours. The only part that is ours is that it is where we came from. It in no way describes who we are or where we are going to. I recently saw a woman on television that had been used as a child in the twin studies of Auschwitz. She said that she no longer lives in hatred of the Nazi’s because to do so forces her to also remain a victim of the Nazi’s. She refuses to remain a victim because she said that victims have no hope, no future, no freedom, and no life. She chooses to master her life. When we hold on to experiences of the past, we remain victims of that past, we live facing backwards, with no future and no control. It does not matter what it is that we need to let go of, or move beyond if we do not free ourselves from it – it becomes a broken record that plays the same song over and over and over again throughout our entire lives. If it was a time when we were happy, the reason we can no longer be happy is because that party has ended, but we haven’t left. Until we leave, until we let go, we can never find another time that is happy. If it is a situation that caused us pain, we will remain in that pain so long as we continue to refer back to that painful experience. We close off our options because we refuse to leave the pain behind.

Where we are now may either be looked at as the result of our past actions, or the starting point of our future. Whether or not we are where we planned to be, our ego becomes attached to either being the creator of that situation or the victim of it. We have the power within us to heal ourselves. We do not have the power to heal our experience. Our lives are not in need of healing, or of growing, they are stations along the train’s route. We go in, we get what we need and we come out. We do not become the station because we stopped there. If the station has heartbreakers in it, our hearts will be broken, not because we deserve it, and not because we don’t, but because this is the route that our soul’s planned out for their growth and this stop on the path happens to have heartbreakers in it. The only reason that the soul incarnates here is to learn what it feels like to be…, what it feels like to have____, what it feels like to give _____, what it feels like to take _____, and what it feels like to lose_____. Each stop on our journey teaches one of those things. From each of those experiences, we are meant to find a way to love better, to have more compassion, to embrace more, and to give more____. As we return to the train, we should leave everything behind except the lessons we learn.
We are not our experiences. They do not define us. We are not the baby who could not reach the chair. We are the baby who grew into the child who reached the chair and the adult who stood above the chair.

It is much easier to let go of the past if we do not identify with it. Our lives consist of stations on a route designed by God and the soul. We always return to the train when it is time to leave the station. Sometimes we don’t want to return to the train, and at those times, we are returned by circumstance. It is not a mistake, it is not because there is something wrong with us, it is because the train keeps its schedule and so do we until we reach the final stop and find that we are Home. What we learn from each stop along the way determines the next stop. If we leave too much of ourselves behind, or identify ourselves with the station we are in, we will find that the train may move, but we don’t go anywhere – we don’t go forward and we can’t go back. We move to a better station when we let go of the old, and take with us only the ticket, which comes in the form of what we have learned. When a baby closes his eyes at night, a life has ended for him. When he awakens in the morning, although his surroundings may remain familiar for him, life has begun anew. Yesterday, when he stood, he fell. Today, when he stood, he walked. Tomorrow, when he stands, he will run. The only connections between each of those days are the ability, the lesson, and the new starting point.

My younger daughter had a difficult time with accepting authority in pre-kindergarten. She told her teachers off, even attacking the assistant teacher when she threatened to call her father. Each day, when we picked her up from school, she was scolded and told to remain in her room while her brother was allowed to play outside. Finally, on the last day of the week, when I told her to be good and listen to her teachers, she said. “Forget that bad girl mommy, she’s gone!” Her history was that girl, who had tantrums; she soon learned that they were not worth the price. She did not attach emotionally to what that girl did, only what this girl learned from it. She knew instinctively that she could be whoever she wanted to be on this new day in this new life. She never felt that she had to incorporate the emotional baggage into her being, justify it, or even give it a second thought, that was then and this was now.

Sometimes, when I see where I am today and where I could have been had I turned left instead of right; I begin to beat myself up. Then I think, “If only I could go back to that moment and do it differently”, and I realize that to go back means to be who I was and know only what I knew at the time. I would never do it differently so long as I was who I was then and believed what I then believed. There would always be a left or a right turn to make without foreknowledge of how it would turn out. It is easy to make the correct turn when we have a map. And I believe that if God meant us to know where to go, He would have given us a map. I also believe, that just as a parent child-proofs a home so that a child will not venture into any areas where it is not meant to go, the universe limits the directions that we may go and choices that we may make so that each turn, whichever it is that we take, will give us the chance to learn the lesson and receive the gift that is ours. And so I accept that I am richer for the life that I have led, and I expect that life will give me as many opportunities to use what I have learned as it gave me to learn them. Learning how to stand was hard, but I learned and I took that learning with me when I had to learn to walk. Now I believe that I am, finally, ready to run.

Life is always moving forward, and, as a part of life, we too have the opportunity to move with it. In front of us, naturally, is empty track. That means that before us lie unlimited possibilities. Behind us is the past, it is devoid of life, devoid of nourishment – whatever we carry with us is rotting away. Whether it was good or it was bad it is rotten and will contaminate whatever it comes in contact with. If we remained in the victory of standing up for the first time, we would not move to the victory of walking. If we remained in the pain of the first time that we fell, we would never have experienced the victory of taking the first step.
We need to always have our hands free, our hearts and minds open in anticipation of what awaits us, and our eyes alert for the lessons and the gifts that are here for us. Life begins anew each day, as do we. We are not defined by our past, anymore than we are defined by the stations along the journey. We cannot be defined until we reach the end of the journey, until that time we are in the process of defining ourselves. We are always becoming. We are not becoming what the past has made us, or given us but we are becoming what we ourselves have set out to become. It doesn’t matter what we begin with, we can turn empty pockets into full ones, and copper into gold. We can make whatever we have into whatever we want, and whoever we were into whoever we want to be, so long as we let go. The past is behind us and it will always prevent us from seeing where we could go. It will always prevent us from being who we could be. When we hold on, we are full of what we are holding on to even though it has no more nourishment for us. Whatever we hold on to uses up the space that we need for happiness. We are not alone because no one will love us; we are alone because we are so filled with past pain that we have left no room for love. Just let go of the past and you will find that along with the past, you have released all that ever limited you.